1928- [var. 1929]; b. ?Dublin; ed. UCD and New Orleans; boxer and sports-writer; Bar 1951; wrote biography of Oliver St. John Gogarty (1964); Brendan Behan (1970), and studies of the early twentieth-century Irish troubles and the Irish Literary Revival; one-man show on Behan Dublin Th. Fest., 1971, and produced as documentary film by Four Oaks Foundation, 1987; one-man show on Gogarty, Dublin Th. Fest., 1975;

plays in the Noh style produced at the Abbey Theatre, 1977, and later at the Dublin Th. Fest., 1979 and off-Broadway 1981; also Executions a play based on events of 1922-23 (Peacock 1985) and Conway Mill Th., Belfast (1988), and after that at Theatre Les Baladins dAgenais, in Lot-en-Garonne, France (1989); compared with Costa-Gavras (e.g., Battle of Algiers);

issued The Oval Machine, a play based on the Greek play Hipplytus (Project Th. 1986); Trinity of Two (Abbey, May 1988), a play on Oscar Wilde and Edward Carson; cantata-version of his play Deirdre with music by Eric Sweeney (Nat. Symp. Orchestra & Chamber Choir, 1990); three Noh plays produced at Fraunhofer Th., Munich (May 1991); wrote Joyicity (Actors Playhouse NY, 1992); published three production diaries with Execution (1992);

invited to Japan by Hideo Kanze to view Noh productions, Nov. 1992; sold film rights of Brendan Behan to Davis-Panzer Prods. (LA), 1993; trans. Les Fleurs du Mal (1995); issued The Ulick OConnor Diaries 1970-1981: A Cavalier Irishman (2001), covering Irish and international encounters with the well-known and documenting his own part in bringing the IRA into the peace process - an claim treated with scepticism by some commentators;

issued The Kiss (2009), new and selected poems and translations; OConnor is a long-standing Aosdána member; his br. Garrett, a psychiatrist and CEO of the Betty Ford Clinic, California, is married to Fionnula Flanagan. DIW

CommentaryJohn Keyes, review of Trinity of Two (Linen Hall Review, May 10-12 1995), in Fortnight (June 1995), [q.p.]; suggests that, in sacrificing their essential Irishness, Wilde and Carson set themselves up as dupes of the English establishment, wilfully creating the circumstances for their ultimate defeat ... this establishment, to which the word hypocritical is invariably applied, is the villain of the piece, inviting the hisses of the audience.

Declan Kiberd, review of Poems of the Damned, with others by Heaney, and Patrick Crotty (ed.,), in Tribune Magazine ( 3 Dec. 1995), Books [Sect.]: he has hit on the appropriate style, laconic but not bleak, to capture Baudelaires elegant desperation. (p.21.)

Toby Barnard, review of Ulick OConnor, The Ulick OConnor Diaries, 1970-1981: A Cavalier Irishman (2001), in Times Literary Supplement (17 Aug. 2001), p.26; relates that the diaries deal with responses to Bloody Sunday, with OConnor as one of the official mournersat St. Eugenes Cathedral; allegiances to Fianna Fáil espec. Jack Lynch; caustic remarks about Conor Cruise OBrien; with Trevor West, he explored the possibility of a separate Northern republican hardline with Unionists and nationalists; to a degree inconceivable in Britain, OConnor combined careers as actor, writer, trouble shooter, television star, athlete and man about town; those mentioned in the diaries incl. Monk Gbbon, Sean O'aolain; Edna OBrien, Noel Coward, Ninette de Valois (a cold one), Waugh and Betjeman (in New York) William Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso and Orlofsky; Viva of Warhol Blue Movie fame; Cracky Clonmore (later Earl of Wicklow); reviewer notes that even reported jokes seem funny, even hilarious; evokes Dublin now largely vanished; sensitivity extends beyond the built environment to its setting of mountains and sea; much more to his world than Ireland; considers the source diaries a mine for future historical of the politics of late 20th-century Ireland.

QuotationsYeats in thrall: OConnor calls Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory very different women with one thing in common, both influenced W. B. Yeats causing him to create some of his most poignant, memorable, and truly brilliant poems and plays. (The Yeats Companion, London: Mandarin 1991, p.44.)

Colonial ferret: 'We underestimated the ferret-like grip of a colonial power. The thirteen dead at Derry and the subsequent cover-up by Lord Widgery should have prepared us for the time when a former Master of the Rolls would Uriah Heap-like wash his hands of justice, as Lord Denning did when he declared that in cases such as the Birmingham Six it was better that they should stay in jail, even if they were innocent, than that the English system of justice should be undermined by an admission of error. ... It showed us how England really feels about Ireland - and if we forget that were living in a fools paradise. (p.22.)

The Literary Renaissance 1880-1904: The New Irishman, in Blackrock Society: Proceedings 2003, pp.4-15: In July [sic] 1958, I attended the funeral service of Lennox Robinson, a Director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin[,] and one of its early successful playwrights. The service was held in St. Patrick s Cahtedral in the eart of Dublin. St. Patrick s is the showplace of the Anglo-Irish, a splendid building with soaring Gothic vaults and a baptismal font in which it is said a Scandanavian king of Dublin was baptised. The service was indistinguishable from the Anglican one. The anthem was Greens Lord Let Me Know Mine End and the voices of the choir swirled upwards against the ribbed vaults, in the soaring and receding echo of Anglican chant. / On the walls of the Cathedral hung the flags of reiments who had distinguished themselves in the service of Empire. Beneath were inscribed the names of the many battles in which generations of Anglo-Irish had fought to build up Englands power across the globe. But the voice of the Dean who read the lesson was unmistakably Irish, and so were the faces of those who filled the pews. As the Catholic friends of Lennox Robinson had been prohibited by their Archbishop from taking part in the service, it could fairly be siad that the majority of people there represented were Protestant Irish. But that these were Irish and not English there was no doubt, though the head of their church had been an English queen. [... &c.] [Cont.] (pp.6-7.)

The Literary Renaissance 1880-1904 [...] (2003) - cont.: Lady Gregory was well enough to come to Dublin at the end of the week and she, Yeats and Synge met together one afternoon at the theatre. One can imagine the three, as they talked in animated fashion about their plans, wandering on and [13] off the stage to savour their new building from the vantage point from which their plays would be presented. They had now a theatre, a company of actors and a group of playwrights. This would be a place where the imagination would have free rein. The theatre could help to fuse the national image so that the people might find an identity. It would be the centre around which a renaissance of writing and poetry could grow up. As they stood on the stage in the gloom of a winters afternoon, looking out into the dark of the pit beyond the gleam of the brass rail around the orchestra stalls, and the slender cast iron poles supporting the curve of the balcony, they could not have foreseen the difficulty they would face - the interminable quarrels with the players and managers, near bankruptcies, even riots. But they had a common bond. The class they had come from did not give in easily and had achieved much as organisers and administrators in many countries of the world. They would use these gifts now for the benefit of the people amongst whom their ancestors had come centuries before, to articulate a sunken culture into the literature of the world. [Quotes Yeats: John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang / Must come from contact with the soil, from that / Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong. / We three alone in modern times had brought / Everything down to that sole test again.; pp.13-14; end.)

NotesBernard Benstock, On the Nature of Evidence in Ulysses, in James Joyce: An Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982), notes that Ulick OConnor mistakenly identifies the Burtons in the Lestrygonians chapter of Ulysses with the Bailey pub in his short work The Bailey: The Story of a Famous Tavern (Dublin: Bailey 1968) - quoting: James Joyce refers to the Bailey in Ulysses under the name of Burton. He used the Bailey as the locale for the Lestrygonian episode (O'Connor, op. cit., p.8; Benstock, p.48.) Vide Ulysses: the Bailey restaurant across the street [...] Dirty eaters, Bloom thought. The error is perpetuated in William Borders, In praise of Irelands Giants on a Literary Tour of Dublin in New York Times, (Sun. 18 May 1980), Travel Sect. - viz., (NYT, p.22; Benstock, n.6, p.64). Benstock taking his lead from the topographical directions in Ulysses (viz., turned back towards Grafton street, U170) and Hely Thoms Official Directory, 1904 (p.2068) while pointing out that the Burton restaurant was a separate establishment which had ceased trading in the interim. He further indicates that Richard M. Kain got it right in Fabulous Voyager (1947, p.273) while William York Tindall got it wrong in A Readers Guide to James Joyce (1959, p.172.)